I've seen Test Driven Development work, so why not adjust it slightly and have the attendees (who own the requirements after all) drive the presentation? Today, at the in-between conference (a.k.a. Microsoft Community Summit 2008), I did just that. I had the attendees drive my four hour presentation. I did this in the Open Space room, and it not only fit with the theme of that room, but it worked great!

As the attendees arrived, I handed them 3-5 3x5 cards - the cool ones from 3M that you can sort, stack, and stick to surfaces.

Here are the topics (backlog items) that they came up with:

• How do you customize work item types?
• (What) team size to justify the usage of Team System?
• What's new and improved in VSTS 2008 vs. VSTS 2005?
• Continuous Integration (x 3)
• What performance degradation (can occur) from extensive branching?
• Integration with external tools (e.g. Mercury Quality Center, Doors)
• TDD
• Multiple builds running at the same time
• How to limit CI build to only trigger when for certain check-ins (by location)
• Best practices
• How to customize Code Analysis
• What makes VSTS more beneficial than VS Professional?
• What is Team Foundation Server?

And my personal favorite:

• I'm here to see if you're a good presenter because my company is thinking of bringing you in for a day to teach the team.

For those of you who attended my talk, here's a link to my notes and my worst practices presentation.

Let’s face it, going to technical conferences is good for your career, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. What you need is an outlet. You need to have fun. That’s where we step in.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza!

Microsoft is bringing back GeekFest! Join them at Howl at the Moon for a night of lousy pizza, cheap beer, dueling pianos, socializing and one wild rubber duck competition….yes, a rubber duck competition.

There is limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference, you can pre-register here.

Register and pick up your "duck" ticket in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (TLA) information desk. You must have a "duck" ticket to get into the party. One "duck" admits up to two people.

When:
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 from 7:00 PM -10:00 PM ET

Where:
Howl at the Moon, 8815 International Drive, Orlando, FL 32819

Ticketing:
You must have a "duck" ticket to attend the party. One duck admits two.

It's not much, but we heard that call that there "wouldn't be free coffee" at the Boise Code Camp 3.0 this coming March 8, so we're kicking in, so that we can enjoy free coffee. Ahem.

This way, we don't have to walk around with one of these things on our backs:

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group on Wednesday, December 5th.

 

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

 

There will be two sessions that day:

• 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time (Add to Calendar)
• 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time (Add to Calendar)

FTP Online has started a new Team System column written by me! I'll be writing about virtually anything that comes to mind or that you want me to write about! It's a twice monthly column and I'll be looking for some good article ideas from process and methodology to the technical nuts and bolts. I only have 800 words or less so they will only be point issues and not overly in-depth (unless I do a continuing series type of thing). You can view the first column on Test Driven Development in Team System today.

I just ran into this blog while doing some surfing.  It wasn't on my blog roll, but it is now.    It's by Eugene Zakhareyev from Attrice.  If you remember from our Widgets page, they are the makers of the TFVC Workspace Sidekick and the MSBuild Sidekick.  Both of those are tools you should be checking out!  But back to the blog.  Eugene is blogging many of his own personal observations about TFS, and since he's so intimately involved with TFS, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on his findings and comments!  His blog can be found here.

Welcome to the ISVs who are attending this quarter's ISV Community Days Events!  Here's a link to download some additional materials.  This covers the presenations, demos and scripts so you can run through them yourselves!

http://go.netdesk.com/communitydays/events/resources.aspx

Happy coding!